Abstract: The war on terror has been continually compared to the Cold War, and in this thesis, I
examine the speeches that mark the start of each war: Bush’s September 20, 2001, speech and
the Truman Doctrine respectively. Through cultural criticism and the alignment of the texts
within the genre of crisis rhetoric, I analyze the two speeches to demonstrate how they fit into the
genre, as well as how they create a rhetorical consciousness of the times in which they were
given. I use the analysis of values, ideographs, myths, and fantasy themes, as outlined by
Roderick Hart and Suzanne Daughton, to focus my approach to cultural criticism, and each
analysis is explicated in a different chapter. Each chapter reveals how the incorporation of the
specific cultural criticism approach contributes to the persuasiveness and aids in the creation of
consciousness and crisis in Truman and Bush’s speeches. Crisis and consciousness creation are
the means by which rhetors set up their argument in order to persuade their audiences. Crisis
creation creates exigence even if there is not a crisis situation and defines it if there is.
Consciousness creation provides the rhetorical vision for the audience to interpret and respond to
a given situation. In order to explicate the creation of consciousness, I apply Ernest Bormann,
John Cragan, and Donald Shields’s theory on symbolic convergence theory and the Cold War,
and for crisis creation, I apply the three elements of the crisis rhetoric genre as outlined by
Theodore Windt. Both presidents’ speeches call upon theoretic, economic, social, religious, and
political values; the ideographs of freedom, democracy, justice; identity and eschatological
myths; and the One World, Power Politics, and Red Fascism fantasy theme rhetorical visions to
create rhetorical consciousness and crisis among the American people.